


A Mabari Makes Three

by Byacolate, mywordsflyup



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Post-Canon, Post-Trespasser, Transfiguration, Transmogrification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2018-07-24 08:57:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7502160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Byacolate/pseuds/Byacolate, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mywordsflyup/pseuds/mywordsflyup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to adapt to domesticity (with varying levels of success).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

Nose to the dusty floor, Custard searches every crevice of the cabin before either of them have fully stepped through the door. His paws leave great prints that follow wherever he goes, and by the time he’s satisfied with his search, his dark coat is finely covered in dust that lightens him several shades. He sneezes, and Cullen drags a hand between his ears.

 

“I could ask for no finer scout,” he says, setting his bags to the floor to give Custard a proper scratching.

 

Lavellan lifts an overturned table in the middle of the room back onto its legs and sets her own bags on top. “A few come to mind,” she says, unclasping the traveling cloak from her throat and draping it over her packs. Cullen stands to join her at the windows to survey the wooden slats nailed across each one. Prying them open by hand will prove challenging, but a bit of light wouldn’t go amiss. Fresh air too, he thinks, when Custard sneezes again.

 

“Encouragement is important for morale. You don’t suppose anyone left behind any convenient tools?”

 

Lavellan snorts and digs her fingers behind one of the boards, testing the resistance. The wood is old, and not terribly thick, and the nails squeak in protest.

 

“No such luck,” she says and grips the board a little harder, letting just the right amount of magic run through her fingers and into the old wood. The nails squeak once more as they slowly start to turn and twist themselves out of the wood. It’s a subtle bit of magic, one that’s more about control than flashiness, but when the nails clatter on the ground they still manage to make quite a bit of noise.

 

Cullen makes a sound that’s not quite disagreement but a moment later, she feels his hand on the small of her back. “Still not very patient,” he observes but helps her to pry open the window once the last board is on the floor.

 

It’s mostly covered with red five-leaved ivy but after a bit of tugging and cutting, light streams into the room, revealing just how dusty and run-down it really is.

 

“Well,” Cullen says as Lavellan moves over to the next window. “It will take some work. But we’ve seen worse.”

 

Custard trots in and out at his leisure while they work. A few gusts of magic push the worst of the dust out of the open doors and windows, and the utility rope in Cullen’s pack makes for a fine clothesline to beat and air out the thin feather mattress from inside. Lavellan would prefer to do away with the whole of it, moth-eaten and musty as it is, but Cullen is a deft hand with a needle and thread, and he’d prefer not to sleep on the ground any more than necessary.

 

It’s a small cabin - the larger room serves as a kitchen and dining area with a cozy fireplace, and a bedroom beyond. At some point during its abandonment, someone made away with the chairs and picked it clean, aside from the wobbly table and cumbersome bed.

 

Most interesting is the bathtub outside, pressed snugly against the back of the cabin. It’s grimy and stained by old rainwater and time, but the sight of it gives them pause.

 

And it does make them think as they retreat at day’s end to the creek behind the cabin to clean the dust and sweat from their skin.

 

The underground heated baths in Skyhold were a luxury, a nostalgic one they both lament as the snowfed stream licks up their naked skin. _“Maker,”_ Cullen gasps as his wife’s face sets with determination and she submerges herself in one swift move. He knows he ought do the same, but he’s afraid of plunging any deeper than his thighs.

 

“Skyhold has made me soft,” he says as if to explain his hesitation as he wades through the little stream, working up the courage to dive in.

 

“We’ll get used to it,” Lavellan says with all the confidence of someone who’s spent many years of her life bathing in ice-cold water just like this. Cullen watches with dread as she tips her head back to get her hair wet.

 

The thought of doing this every day doesn’t make the whole thing any easier. “The tub,” he says and lowers himself a little bit just to freeze in place when the water laps at his upper thighs. “We should definitely take a look at that tub.”

 

She splashes a bit of water in his direction with both prosthetic hand and flesh, just enough to make him flinch and shudder, and runs her fingers through her hair. “Is this more pressing than the leaky roof? Or the dearth of furniture?”

 

He laughs. “Unless you want to bathe here during the winter. Would you crack the ice with magic?”

 

This time when she splashes him, the water hits him in the face - enough to make him splutter and reel back.

 

“You have to go under all at once,” she says, her face deceptively straight for the devious light in her eyes. “It makes it easier.”

 

“I know what it does,” Cullen grouses, flicking water back in her direction. She bobs her head under and pulls herself toward him along the stones of the creek. Cullen attempts to step back when she reaches for his leg, but his reflexes are too slow. With a firm hook around his knee, she tugs him off balance. Cullen drops with a shout.

 

As he’d feared, very tender parts of his anatomy all but crawl back inside his body. He pops up, cold and miserable, rubbing water out of his eyes.

 

“The tub,” he insists.

 

Lavellan is smiling, now.

 

Back at the cabin, she helps him rub some warmth back into his frozen limbs - with a little bit of magic, but mostly with sly smiles and a lot of teasing. Her hand is warm when she presses it against his chest, and even warmer when she slides it over his shoulders and the back of his neck.  

 

“You could do that to the water in the tub, couldn’t you?” he asks her later, in front of the fire with a blanket draped over his shoulders.

 

She looks up from the dented old tea pot in her hand. It’s the same one they used on the road to heat up water - sometimes on the fire, but usually through Lavellan’s magic. Cullen wiggles his fingers to demonstrate what he means. It only earns him a little snort.

 

“Heat it up? Yes, of course.” Steam rises from the pot in her hand. “But I doubt it’d be as comfortable as it was in Skyhold, out in the open like that.”

 

Cullen makes a contemplative noise and pulls the blanket a little tighter around himself.

 

She pours them both a cup of tea and returns the pot to the table before she folds herself by his side. Custard’s little tail wags with his entire backside and he transfers his head from Cullen’s feet to her knee.

 

“It’s nice enough, isn’t it?” Cullen asks, blowing over the top of his cup. Lavellan’s head falls to his shoulder. “The house.”

 

“The roof is sturdy,” she agrees. “And there are probably no infestations the dog couldn’t handle.”

 

Custard whuffs and scoots himself closer until his head rests fully in her lap.

 

“It’ll be nice to stop and rest for a while,” Cullen says. Lavellan makes a noise of acknowledgement. He has to dislodge her for a moment to take half the blanket from around himself and wrap it around her narrow shoulders too. Her hair is damp and smells of soap, and he gives in to the impulse to kiss her temple. “Don’t you think? Somewhere quiet like this.”

 

“Like cattle separated from the herd.”

 

Quietly, he laughs.

 

Cullen’s wedding ring clinks against the side of the tin mug as he lifts it to his lips for a sip.

 

It’s quiet, apart from the crackling of the fire and the house settling. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hoots. “Was it like this when you grew up?”

 

“Mmh?” She doesn’t move - if anything, she leans closer into him.

 

“With your clan, I mean.”

 

“With four walls and a roof and a dog in my lap? Hardly.”

 

“No,” he says and takes another sip of tea. “I mean the silence. There’s nothing but nature for miles.”

 

She sits up a little straighter to take her own cup from where it’s sitting on the floor in front of them. “Not really,” she says after a moment of hesitation. “A Dalish clan is usually anything but quiet.”

 

“So this is new for you too.”

 

She shrugs and rest her head back on his shoulder.

 

“There was always a number of people. It’s never been so… isolated.”

 

“Yes.” He rests his cheek against her head. “I’ve never been alone with just one person for so long in my life, I think. I’m enjoying the peace and quiet.”

 

“It’s been too long since I’ve heard you shouting at people.”

 

Cullen’s arm drops from her shoulders to her waist. “I can still shout.”

 

“So can I. But then where would all your peace and quiet be?”

 

He smiles and sets his cup aside.

 

“We hardly need peace and quiet all the time,” he says, and pulls her closer. Custard huffs at the shift in position, but Lavellan pays him no mind, running her fingers over Cullen’s unshaven jaw when he ducks in to kiss her.

 

The dog finally accepts defeat when she pushes him off her legs completely, gentle but determined, to slip onto Cullen’s lap fully. All his huffing and whining proves fruitless, so he relocates to a spot under the table.

 

With the blanket having fallen off of Lavellan's shoulders, Cullen quickly wraps his arms around her to keep her warm. She cups his face with her hand and kisses him again.

 

“Do you still object to the mattress?” he asks when she moves on to press small kisses on his jaw and neck.

 

“A little less now.”

 

He laughs at the way she squirms a little when he brushes his thumbs over the stripe of exposed skin below her tunic. But neither of them make a move to get up.

 

“It’ll be nice,” he says as if her fingers gently tugging at his hair weren’t distracting at all, “without a hundred problems demanding our attention. To sleep in for once.”

 

She pauses and then leans back a bit to look at him, the disbelief on her face almost comical. “That will never happen.”

 

He sets his face with determination like steel and cups both hands over her thighs to pull her closer. “Perhaps if I make a concentrated effort.”

 

“You rise with the sun like a farmer,” she says, dry as a bone even as she pulls the tunic from her body and tosses it in the direction of their packs.

 

“Like a soldier,” he corrects, somehow, even distracted as she is by the naked skin before him.

 

So close to the mountains in early spring, the days are warm but the nights are cool, and her dark skin pebbles with gooseflesh before she’s even worked a decent bruise into the side of his neck. Cullen considers retreating to the bed stacked high with their bedrolls, but when she reaches down between his legs, he decides with haste that the blanket will do. He grabs at it and wraps it around her shoulders before he gets his hands on her again, crawling up the bumps of her spine, the sturdy muscle of her shoulders.

 

Custard snorts to himself under the table. Pulling back from the dark mark she’s made near Cullen’s throat, she points toward the bedroom. “Go.”

 

Custard huffs. Cullen feels suddenly very awkward, stilling his hands where he’d been palming at his wife’s backside. Lavellan doesn’t waver. “Go, or you may stand guard outside tonight.”

 

With a deep, deep sigh, Custard heaves himself up and makes his way into the bedroom morosely.

 

Cullen can’t help a little huff of laughter. “He listens to you more than to me.”

 

“That’s because you coddle him,” Lavellan says, already busy with undoing the lacing of his shirt.

 

“Probably,” he concedes and covers her hand with his when she starts cursing at the knots that won’t budge. Some things are still easier with two hands but he decides to make matters short and just pulls his shirt over his head as it is.

 

She frowns at him but her fingers have already returned to running through his curls, the gentle scrape of her nails against his scalp making him shiver. “And you call me impatient.”

 

Instead of answering, he ducks his head to kiss her neck and she turns her head with a little sigh to give him better access. Her dark skin isn’t marked as easily as his, but he does his best nevertheless. By the time he’s managed to leave a small bruise with tongue and teeth and patience, she’s squirming in his lap again - pressing against him in a way that makes thinking more and more difficult.

 

The blanket comes off her shoulders and around his with a flourish, and Cullen nearly protests when she pushes him down. He scrambles to plant his feet firmly on the floor, catching himself with a hand as he lands on his back, the other on her hip. “The floor is still filthy,” she says, as though they haven’t been in a similar position several nights on the cold, hard ground.

 

Still, Cullen isn’t complaining, and she tugs at the hair on his face for a moment before she ducks down to kiss him.

 

He hasn’t shaved in well over a week, and he considers that he might wait a little longer if she is so invested in it.

 

“This isn’t going to make it cleaner,” he says with a grin when she pushes herself back up, palms to his chest. She stares down at him blandly.

 

“I should write to Bull,” she says, situating herself atop him in a way that makes him gasp. “Tell him that you say things like _this_ now.”

 

“If you want him to know that you’re thinking about him in the middle of this…”

 

She scoffs and he’s fairly certain that she shifts her position like that on purpose. The tug on his beard is a little harsher this time when she leans down to kiss him.

 

He holds on to her thighs, not sure if he wants her to move or to stay still, heat already coiling deep in his belly. He feels her teeth on his neck and then his shoulder as she slides down, kissing and marking him along the way.

 

Straddling him like this, she’s pinning him down, but she’s hardly heavy enough to keep him from bucking up. It takes all his willpower not to throw her off balance like that, his breath shuddering. It’s difficult enough sometimes with only one arm of flesh and he doesn’t intend to make it any more difficult for her.

 

Which is exactly the moment when she decides to push herself back up and then palm at him through his trousers. His moan is awfully loud in the nearly empty cabin and he can see the glint of mischief in her eyes when she does it again.

 

“Maker’s breath,” he groans, tugging at the laces of her trousers. “You’re going to kill me if we don’t get these off.”

 

“The Templars made you prone to exaggeration,” Lavellan remarks, sitting up  to shimmy her trousers down past her thighs.

 

“Among other things.” He frowns and gathers her up in his arms before he rolls them over, her back against the blanket. Her pants are off and tossed away, _finally_ , and Cullen gets down on his elbows by her waist. She props herself up on an elbow, one corner of her mouth ticked upward.

 

“You were very desperate just a moment ago.”

 

Cullen adopts a stormier frown, reaching for her thighs to push them wider apart. “The Templars taught me patience as well.” He fights to keep his expression as he meets her gaze. “And the appropriate worship for divinity.”

 

Lavellan’s face is nigh unreadable. “I’m leaving you to live a solitary life in the forest. And I’m taking your dog.”

 

“Cruel,” Cullen says and hides his laughter by ducking his head. His lips are close to her hip now and he presses a kiss to it. “I could always just stop… worshipping.”

 

She huffs. “Don’t you dare.” She nudges him in the side with her knee. “But I need you to stop calling it that.”

 

He moves further down between her legs, one hand pressed steadily against her hip. “I can’t deny my upbringing,” he says and kisses the inside of her thigh, just above her knee.

 

The frown on her face does nothing to distract from the flush spreading from her cheeks down her neck. “You could try a little harder,” she says.

 

“I intend to.”

 

The insides of her thighs are more easily marked than the rest of her skin and by the time he finally puts his mouth to her, he’s left a pair of angry dark marks on them - each one leaving her gasping underneath him.

 

One of her heels presses hard into the meat of his back. “Cullen,” she all but growls with impatience. He sinks his teeth into the juncture of her thigh and she yelps, her foot skittering across his back. She mutters something in Elven and digs her fingers into his curls. _“Cullen.”_

 

He smiles against her skin, the hearth fire warming his legs as he makes himself comfortable between hers. When he finally puts his mouth to her, the noise she makes nearly breaks his heart. Her fingers tighten in his hair, and the more she demands, the more he loves to give.

 

She’s a patient woman when she must be, but never in bed - or on the floor, or across his desk - and the tighter he holds her thighs, the more desperate her demands become. By the time she’s shaken apart and panting, he’s very nearly there himself.

 

With an almost disappointing amount of dexterity, considering all his hard work, she lifts herself up and swiftly knocks him over onto his back. They’ve rolled away from the blanket now, but Cullen’s mind is far from the next creek bath he’ll have to take for it when she leans down to kiss him and takes him in hand.

 

The finesse of their kiss is nonexistent, Cullen gasping against her mouth as she brings him closer and closer until he comes, trousers bunched around his thighs. He goes boneless on the floor and she flops down on top of him, a long line of heat.

 

“This is filthy,” Lavellan says, stroking at one of the marks she’s made on his shoulder. He huffs out a laugh, draping an arm over her naked back.

 

“Didn’t you grow up in the forest?”

 

“We had _standards,_ shemlen.”

 

She presses soft kisses on the slope of his shoulder, too exhausted to move her head any further. Cullen thinks he could fall asleep like this - hard floor, filth and all.

 

But after a while, she pushes herself up and to her feet with a deep sigh, ignoring Cullen’s mumbled protests. There’s still some water left from what they brought in with a bucket from the stream and she has the mercy to heat it up a bit before carrying it back to him.

 

“You don’t have to…” he starts but she swats his hand away before starting to clean him.

 

It takes a while - mostly because Cullen can’t help himself but pull her down to kiss her again and again. But in the end, they've both managed to wash away most of the filth to allow them to postpone another dive into the cold stream.

 

When they finally make it to the bedroom, they find Custard waiting for them on the floor at the foot of their bed, wagging his tail wildly enough to shake his entire body. Cullen scratches him between the ears before letting himself fall onto the mattress. She crawls in next to him, sandwiched between two bedrolls on top of the mattress she detests, the blanket thrown overtop them both with a small measure of distaste.

 

Lavellan presses her nose against the back of his neck and drapes her arm over him, pressed to his back to absorb his heat. She mumbles something there, and it tickles  enough to rouse him.

 

“Hmm?”

 

She yawns, her breath fanning hotly over his neck. “If you manage to sleep in, I’ll let you keep the dog.”

 

“Hmmh?”

 

“When I run off to the forest.”

  
  
Cullen’s laugh is little more than a short puff of breath, and he sluggishly pats her hand. “Generous.”

 

 

 

 

 

Neither of them sleep in - although Cullen insists that he woke up well after sunrise, later than he has for years. It might be the morning sunlight that wakes him after all. Or perhaps the dust that tickles his nose. Or the giant mabari that jumps onto his bed, with enough enthusiasm to rouse an army.

 

Cullen wakes up with a start, one hand reaching for a sword that isn’t there. Before he can fully realize what’s happening, Custard pants and puffs in his face, trampling all over him with his huge paws.

 

“Good morning,” Lavellan says from where she’s leaning against the door frame, a steaming cup in her hand and a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth.

 

“On the bed? Really?” Cullen pushes Custard to the side, which only earns him a good lick and slobber all over his hand. “And you accuse me of coddling him?”

 

Lavellan shrugs, her grin badly hidden behind the rim of her cup as she takes a sip.

 

Somehow, Cullen manages to stagger out of bed despite Custard’s affection and pokes around in his bags for clothes. Any clothes will do. He can feel his wife’s stare and when he peeks over his shoulder at her, she doesn’t move her gaze from his backside.

 

Heat creeps up the back of his neck and he ducks his head back down, smiling to himself.

 

“If you truly want to stay, we should clean the tub,” she says once he’s managed to tug on his smalls and trousers. Cullen turns around as he ties a belt around his waist.

 

“I agree,” he says, and finds that the smile is still on his face. She eyes him evenly over the rim of her mug.

 

“It will need daily cleaning, out in the open as it is. There’s no room to bring it inside.”

 

Cullen cinches the belt and reaches for a shirt. “I suppose there isn’t very much else to do with our time, is there?”

 

She makes an indecipherable noise and disappears into the other room while Cullen finishes tugging his shirt on.

 

The leftover rations from their journey will last them a few more days and make for a passable breakfast together with a few cups of strong black tea. The sun is warm for early spring and they move outside to eat. There’s an old wooden bench by the side of the cabin, almost completely swallowed by ivy. But once they free it, it proves to be sturdy enough, despite its age.

 

Custard watches them for a while before deciding to move on to more interesting things, like the bushes beyond the treeline. Cullen and Lavellan watch him from their spot on the bench, the sun warming their faces.

 

“We should start the garden soon,” Cullen says and takes a sip of tea. “There’s a patch behind the house where I think one used to be. We could use the same spot.”

 

Lavellan shrugs. “We could always just hunt.”

 

“Sure. But I think in the long run it would be good to plant some of the things we need.”

 

She makes another noise, sipping at her tea. Her gaze is on the horizon, over sprawling plains toward the Frostbacks. Cullen doesn’t know why someone would abandon a home with such a view. It’s an ideal spot, so close to water, with a sturdy foundation and plenty of privacy.

 

“Neither of us are particularly adept hunters,” he muses.

 

“Custard is a war hound. His breeding would be useless if he couldn’t catch a few rabbits.”

 

The corner of Cullen’s mouth quirks. “He’d probably catch a griffon if it was you who asked him.”

 

“A deer would keep us for weeks, if we properly stored it.”

 

He grins at that, draping his arm over the bench behind her. “The nearest town is an afternoon’s walk. We could find seeds there, some basic supplies.”

 

She sighs but leans against him a bit, her weight comfortable against his side. He knows the little frown on her face well from hours and hours they've spent together at the war table.

 

“I take it your clan didn't garden much?”

 

She scoffs. “There’s no point when you move around as often as we did. And no need when you have good hunters and a forest to provide for .”

 

Cullen laughs. “I’m sure that’s true. But it’s only the two of us.”

 

“And the dog.”

 

“And the dog. But that’s still nothing compared to a whole clan.”

 

Lavellan makes a noise somewhere between annoyance and defeat. “Fine. We’ll do it like the humans. Tidy little rows of plants. Everything in order.”

 

Cullen kisses her hair, taken by a swell of affection. “I’m sure elven farmers exist, too. Somewhere in the world.”

 

“Hm.” She sips her tea. “I didn’t realize we were farmers now.”

 

“Oh, not without any seeds.”

 

Custard trots around the side of the house with pride in his gait and a squealing nug in his jaws. She smirks. “A hunter after all.”

 

Lavellan leaves Cullen’s side to crouch before Custard and once the nug is free, swiftly snaps its neck. “Good boy.”

 

Custard sits heavily, panting and wagging his tail. Cullen… isn’t very hungry anymore.

 

“Not much meat on it,” Lavellan says, weighing the little pink thing in her hand. Cullen isn’t even aware of the face he’s making until Lavellan looks up and raises an eyebrow. “I’ll set some snares. That’s probably more efficient than letting Custard catch them one by one.

 

“Probably,” Cullen says and sets his cup down next to him on the bench.

 

Lavellan gets up. “Don’t worry. We’ll still go to that town to get your… farming supplies.”

 

“Perhaps tomorrow, if the weather allows it.” Cullen gets up from the bench, picking up both their cups. “We should get started on that tub.”

 

Lavellan nods. “I have to go to the stream to wash this.” She holds up the dead nug. “I’ll get some water while I’m there.”

 

Cullen watches her leave, Custard in tow. He’s suddenly even more motivated to avoid another bath in the stream.

 

He busies himself with the debris in the old tub - leaves by the bushel, a chipped bottle likely from some overnight passersby. The tub itself is made of some sort of stone, though Cullen couldn’t place exactly what. He thinks it might be dwarven-made, though what it’s doing in the middle of Ferelden is beyond him.

 

When Lavellan and Custard return, she hands him the bucket of water with her prosthetic hand, the nug in the other. “I’m going to skin this.”

 

He nods, privately grateful he doesn’t have that particular chore.

 

He’s also not thinking about the odd little hands that will be part of their supper.

 

Custard keeps him company for a few short moments, before the _hack-thup_ of a blade through flesh calls to him like a siren song and he bolts for the front of the house.

 

“Shameless,” Cullen mutters to himself, smiling.

 

By the time Lavellan and Custard come back to join him, he’s cleared out all of the debris and started scrubbing away the dirt and grime. Custard circles the tub and looks like he’s considering jumping in, but Lavellan clicks her tongue once and it’s enough to dissuade him. Instead, he settles down in a sunny spot of grass and watches them work from there.

 

“If there’s a spell to help with this, I don’t know it,” Lavellan says as she grabs the second rag from the bucket and kneels down next to Cullen. She heats up the water once more but the rest is hard work. They haven’t even finished cleaning half the tub when both of them are sweating and Cullen’s arms begin to ache.

 

What they find underneath the thick layer of grime, however, gives rise to optimism. The tub is well made and sturdy and even the years of neglect haven’t changed that.

 

Cullen sits up straight and rolls his stiff shoulders. The sun stands high in the sky now, burning down on the back of his neck and his exposed arms. The thought of repeating this task again and again in the future is a little disheartening.

 

Like she’s read his mind, Lavellan sits up and wipes the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “We could build a shelter,” she says, frowning up at the nearby trees. A few leaves fall close to the tub. “Around the tub. A little…” She gestures with her hands. “Area. Room.”

 

“A room for the bath,” Cullen muses, mopping at his own sweat with the hem of his shirt. A cool breeze across the bare skin of his back and stomach is a welcome relief. “I’ve never done much building myself, but we could manage, couldn’t we?”

 

“I have some experience,” she mumbles, shoving Custard away when he trots over to lick at her sweat. “A simple shelter is easy enough.”

 

Cullen drops his shirt and weathers a short glare from his wife for it. The ache in his body is pleasant, and the idea of a project - of building something with his own hands, with his own wife, fills him with an eager bubble of happiness. “As always, I’m happy to follow your lead.”

 

The corner of her mouth quirks up and she tosses her rag back into the bucket. “We need to cut down a few trees anyway for some furniture.” She takes another look at the tub, half of it still covered in dirt. “It would make things a lot easier.”

 

“Perhaps the baths at Skyhold have spoiled us after all.” Cullen stretches his aching muscles.

 

“I’m not the one who’s too scared to dive into the stream.” Her little smile grows teeth, and Cullen laughs.

 

“Of course you are. But have mercy on your poor spoiled husband.”

 

“I’ll consider it,” she says, her gaze back on the nearby trees, likely already concocting a plan.

 

Cullen watches her and despite his stiff muscles and the grime and sweat he feels like jumping over the tub just to grab and kiss her. It must show on his face because when she turns her head back to him, she gives him a quizzical look and takes the rag back out of the bucket. “We should finish this. Or you’ll never get that hot bath you want.”

 

“As you say, Inquisitor,” he says, tipping his head.

 

Custard tackles him when she throws the grimy rag at his chest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room takes longer than he expects to be built.

 

There’s lumber to consider, and proper measurements, and the right tools for the job. They’re rich with time and starved for resources. Still, as promised, his wife is quite proficient at building a lean-to in the interim, and the tub stays mostly clean.

 

The closest village still proudly touts the banner of the Inquisition, and they’re met warmly whenever they return for supplies. They’re open with their adulation, and so Lavellan only goes with Cullen once or twice, leaving the visits to him.

 

When they aren’t planning the build of the room, they’re on their hands and knees in the dirt. For all her teasing, Lavellan takes to the soil with single-minded focus. She has no clear talent for the job, but she approaches it with the attention she affords all her tasks.

 

By the end of the month, the skin on the back of Cullen’s neck has turned from white to angry red and then finally settles on a deep tan. There are new calluses on the palms of his hands, different from the ones years of using a sword have given him. At night he falls into bed, exhausted to the bone and more content than he can remember ever having been.

 

Lavellan takes to tracing the freckles on his arms and shoulders, her fingertips and lips gentle on his skin until he can’t take it anymore and flips her on her back to return the favor.

 

It doesn’t take long for the first green to sprout from the dark soil behind the cabin and the little victory has Lavellan abnormally excited. It’s only dampened somewhat when Cullen reminds her that it’s going to take many more months until they’d be able to harvest anything edible from their garden.

 

“Perhaps I should have hunted us a deer after all,” she says, carefully inspecting the small green stalks.

 

“I suppose you still could,” Cullen says, planting his hands on his hips. “I have no talent with a bow, so I wouldn’t be much use to you.”

 

She pats at the back of his calf with her steel-hewn hand and stands. “That’s alright, my dear simple farmer. Your warrior hound and I will provide.”

 

The very next morning, she leaves him with a kiss, her staff strapped to her back, a hunting knife at her waist. Cullen watches her go from the bed, and rouses himself for a trip into town to feel somewhat useful in her absence.

 

Despite the length of the journey and the burden of supplies upon his return, he’s home before she is. Cullen had anticipated this, and so he unpacks the ingredients for his mother’s vegetable stew and sets to work.

 

Their cabin is very isolated but this is the first time he’s actually completely alone for such a long period of time, without even Custard to keep him company. The silence isn’t uncomfortable. He’s used to the creaking and settling of the house by now and the noises of the forest coming in through the open windows. But he’s still happy to hear the familiar steps of his wife approaching and the sound of Custard’s barking heralding their return.

 

The sun has almost set behind the Frostbacks when he greets them at the door, the evening light soft and golden. Lavellan looks tired but happy, reeking of sweat and with a streak of what might very well be blood on her forehead. She’s handing him the leg of a deer, already skinned.

 

“I dressed it back at the treeline,” she says. “In case there are bears around. I’m going back to get the rest and freeze it but I wanted to bring you this one for dinner first.”

 

The thought of his wife hunting, killing and dressing a deer all by herself made him feel both proud and a little queasy.

 

“Custard helped,” she adds, apropos.

 

“I’m sure he did,” Cullen says fondly. Lavellan smiles a little before she disappears around the side of the house again.

 

He doesn’t suppose his mother would be too disappointed in him for altering her recipe, and dutifully, he strips the meat from the leg and adds it to the pot. Cullen is no stranger to blood, but not not so for butchery; he’s grateful she took the time to clean the leg before bringing it to him.

 

By the time she returns, soaking wet but clean, dinner is on the table for them both. “I’ve frozen it through and tied it high in a tree or tonight,” she says, all but collapsing on the floor to lean against a wall. Cullen takes their bowls and sits beside her, and she takes hers eagerly. Two bites in, she continues, “We’ll smoke it tomorrow.”

 

“I’ve never smoked meat before,” Cullen muses, blowing on his stew. Lavellan doesn’t even wait that long, lifting the bowl to her lips and hissing at the burn.

 

“First time for everything,” she says, scowling at her stew.

 

“There are a lot of those out here.” He blows on it once more before trying the stew. It’s good. Even better with the meat, he has to admit. And _definitely_ better than nug.

 

The hunt has been good for Lavellan. He can see that. For the first time in a long time, she seems to have exhausted her seemingly endless energy reserves. Even after her second bowl of stew, she only seems to get more tired. He laughs a little when she slumps against him with a small sigh.

 

Custards falls asleep underneath the table right after finishing the little scraps and cuttings of deer Cullen reserved for him. His loud snores can be heard even over the crackling of the fire.

 

Cullen all but carries Lavellan to bed despite her mumbled protests. He helps her take off her prosthetic and gets her out of her clothes, and she’s asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.

 

And for a moment, Cullen is content just to sit. He can’t make out her features in the light the fire in the next room provides, but he knows the shape of her face and trails the line of her jaw with his fingertips. She makes a noise when he brushes the hair away from her temple and swats at his hand, drawing quiet laughter from him.

 

He can’t remember when this steady, weightless happiness began, but he does know the cause.

 

It only takes a few short moments to clean their dishes in a bucket and kill the fire, and then he’s out of his clothes and crawling into the fresh, new bed beside her. Normally she gets an arm around him, pressed against his back, but Cullen relishes in the opportunity to drape an arm over her waist. For a long, long moment, he presses a kiss to her forehead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room for the bath is hardly finished before Lavellan is planning a smokehouse. “At least a store room,” she says, fists planted on her hips as she frowns down at the wrapped, perpetually frozen hunks of meat on their kitchen floor. “I can keep freezing them as many times as I need to, but we don’t have the space inside.”

 

“And it’s making Custard a little too excited,” Cullen says and scratches Custard behind the ears. The dog huffs as if in agreement and wags his tail.

 

Cullen suspects that least part of the reason for the smokehouse is that it allows Lavellan to hunt even more just to fill it, but he knows it makes her happy. And the meat is a welcome addition to their diet, however much work it is to come by it.

 

She starts work on it with as much fervor as all her other tasks. They cut down more trees and begin construction not a week after she first suggested it. It’s a little easier this time, having learned from the mistakes they made while building the room for the bath. Lavellan even accompanies Cullen to one of his trips to town, just to get some advice from the local butcher. The man is all too happy to share his wisdom with the Inquisitor, even showing her his own smokehouse behind his store.

 

It takes nearly a full month to finish by themselves. It isn’t perfect, but Lavellan is content, so Cullen is as well. The little hut sits apart from the main house, and with Lavellan’s magic, she manages to use it both to smoke what she catches, and store what meat she chooses to freeze instead.

 

One evening in late summer, as they rest on their newly-crafted chairs at the table, Cullen can’t help but laugh to himself at a thought. Lavellan glances up at him from the other side of the table where she’s reading one of Varric’s letters. “What?”

 

Cullen smiles down at his supper, prodding at a carrot with his fork. Everything on the table was grown or caught by the both of them, and that just makes his smile widen. “It isn’t… funny. Not really. I was only thinking how much we’ve made this place, ah.... Our own.”

 

Lavellan blinks. “I suppose,” she says, and returns her gaze to the letter.

 

“The bath-room, the storehouse, the furniture,” he goes on, glancing over at Custard. “The garden. The shelves we put in last week. The new windows.”

 

“We have too much time on our hands, so we’ve modified the house to suit us,” she says, flipping the letter over to the second page. Varric writes… prolifically.

 

Cullen eats a piece of carrot and watches her read, the familiar little frown in between her eyebrows. One passage makes her smile, just the slightest curve of the lips.

 

Over by the window, Custard sighs deeply and shifts a little.

 

“I've never had this,” Cullen continues after a moment. “Not really. I didn't think I ever would.” He gestures towards the food on the table. “As a Templar you never worry about any of it. Food or a roof over your head. And in the Inquisition…”

 

Lavellan looks up from her letter. “In the Inquisition we had the cooks.”

 

He smiles, knowing exactly what kind of delicacies she preferred back then, despite all her protestations of the opposite.

 

“I’ve never built anything,” he says. “Not quite so literally.”

 

She blinks again and looks at him intently, with the same kind of scrutiny she usually reserves for her letters.

 

“It’s novel to you,” she observes. “To survive on nothing but the fruit of your labor.”

 

It isn’t accusatory - he knows the sharpness in her voice that she reserves for scorn, and there is none of it here. Still, he does feel a little sheepish.

 

“In a way, I suppose. It’s more than that, though.” He leans back against the chair he built with clumsy hands. “I’ve made a home. With you. I’m very happy about it.”

 

She huffs through her nose - a silly habit she’s adopted from Custard - but the corners of her mouth curl up. “Varric’s asked for titles regarding the love story he’s writing for us. I’ll propose ‘The Sentimental Commander’.”

 

Cullen sneers. “He isn’t writing it _for_ us, he’s using us as puppets for his fictional ventriloquism.”

 

“We’ll see some coin for it,” she says absently, scanning over the third page.

 

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

 

She puts down the pages. “Granted, it wouldn’t be the most exciting story if he could see us now. Peace and quiet and not a dragon in sight.”

 

Cullen smiles. “I’d hope so. And I think he’d be glad for it. He’s written enough tragedies for a lifetime.” His eyes flick over to the new shelves, still empty except for a few of Cullen’s books. “He could write a comedy instead. The construction of those shelves alone provide enough material.”

 

She follows his gaze. “I think they turned out rather well. A step up from the chairs, in any case.” She shifts a bit in her seat to make it creak.

 

“You’re too kind.”

 

Her lips quirk up in a smirk before she looks back down toward the letter. “We’ll make a carpenter out of you yet.”

 

“I think like working with my hands,” he says. “Regardless of my… rate of success.”

 

She hums. “I like you working with your hands, too.”

 

Custard grunts just as Cullen perks up. “Do you?”

 

She glances up. “Hmm? That’s the working title of the book as it is now. Varric’s added an excerpt in his letter.”

 

Cullen stares back at her. “The working title of Varric’s exploitative novel -”

 

“‘You Working With Your Hands’, yes.”

 

They keep each other’s gaze for a long, long moment. She’s the one who finally breaks it, primly lifting the letter from the table. “I can tell poor jokes, too.”

 

“Poor,” he repeats as he pushes back his chair, pointedly ignoring the creaking. “Very poor.”

 

“Truly.” She keeps her face blank as he comes around the table but there’s a telltale twitch at the corner of her mouth. “You wound me.”

 

She folds the letter neatly just to let it fall onto the table as she rises up to meet him. He can feel her smiling as he kisses her.

 

“He didn’t really send an excerpt, did he?” Cullen asks as he pulls back, his hands on her back.

 

The breath of her laughter fans over his neck. “I don’t think I would’ve been able to read that with a straight face.”

 

“When it comes to you, I wouldn’t be so sure.” He presses a kiss on the crown of her head. And then, just because he can, on the tip of her left ear. It twitches a little. He does it again, and she bats playfully at his jaw. Her fingers linger in his beard before she pulls him down for another kiss.

 

“Are you going to start working with your hands now?” she asks, drawing a hand down his throat. “It’ll give Varric some new material.”

 

Cullen scowls and pushes the letters away across the table. “He doesn’t need any more ideas.

 

“You don’t want our novel to be accurate?”

 

“I don’t want you to call it _our novel,_ full stop.”

 

Her teeth peek out when she laughs, and her steel hand settles against his hip.

 

“You can write him your complaints yourself. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.”

 

“I tried that once,” he says. “Complaining.”

 

“And that didn’t turn out so well?”

 

“Not for me, at least. I believe it gave him enough material for two pages of dialogue.”

 

She laughs again, open and honest, and he takes advantage of her state of distraction by moving his hands downwards. Her laughs turns into a gasp when he takes hold of her thighs and lifts her up on the edge of the table.

 

“See?” she says and shifts a bit to find a more comfortable position. “I knew you were good with your hands.” She curls her fingers into the soft fabric of his shirt.

 

“I aim to please.”

 

She smirks and leans forward to kiss him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even though the worst of summer ends, Cullen can tell something is amiss.

 

He can’t put his finger on it, but he can feel it in the distance of Lavellan’s gaze, in her restless tossing and turning when they fall into bed. Cullen tries to place it, but he can’t. Point of fact, to his mind, the life they’ve built hedges on the precipice of perfection every single day. The garden flourishes under their attention; the storehouse is always well-stocked; Custard is nothing short of blissfully content with all the space to run, nugs to chase, and hands to pet that he desires. Cullen’s made improvements to his first attempts at furniture.

 

They eat well, they sleep in (relatively speaking), and they have each other.

 

And yet.

 

He finds her up one morning, even earlier than usual, pacing around the outside of the cabin. She’s barefoot, walking through the dewy grass. The sun is still just a vague notion on the horizon, a sliver of light at the edge of the night sky.

 

When she sees him standing in the door, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, she doesn’t stop.

 

“We should lay new shingles on the roof,” she says, taking a few steps back and craning her neck.

 

“What?”

 

“The shingles,” she repeats and points at the roof of the cabin. “We need new ones.”

 

He steps out of the doorway, the wet grass immediately soaking the hem of his trousers. “What are you talking about? They’re fine.”

 

She clicks her tongue in annoyance. “They’re cracked. You can see it from here.”

 

He looks to where she’s pointing. The dark slate shingles are almost completely covered with moss but he can spot where a few of them cave in around the chimney. The other imperfections he can’t see, he leaves up to her keen eyesight. “Some of them,” he admits. “But we knew that when we moved in. It’s not leaking. It’s fine.”

 

“ _Fine_.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the roof. “There are plenty of veins of slate in the forest. It would take a while but -”

 

He says her name - softly but it’s enough to make her stop. “What’s going on?”

 

She gestures at the roof. “We’re in the middle of discussing it.”

 

“It isn’t the roof.” At least, he thinks it isn’t. Cullen rubs a hand across his eyes.

 

He doesn’t say more, and he normally doesn’t need to. She runs a hand through her hair, nudging at Custard with her foot when he plods out to join them and sits at her side.

 

“I’d like to keep busy,” she finally says. He notices then that she hasn’t put her prosthetic in for the day, when that’s the tone she’d normally use with her arms folded. “It isn’t in my nature to... _enjoy_ peace and quiet.”

 

There’s ire in her tone, reflected inward. Cullen steps closer and curls a hand over her shoulder.

 

“I understand,” he says, and he does. He does, truly. Years of duty had made action a necessity - in times of war, he was buried beneath mountains of tasks and duty, and in the short years to follow, he sought that necessity hungrily. For a moment, it catches him off guard that he hasn’t felt any of this restlessness since they’ve arrived.

 

There’s been a weight lifted from his shoulders here; he’s been freed.

 

His wife hasn’t found that contentment yet. But Cullen understands.

 

She stiffens under his touch, just for a moment before taking a deep breath. Custard nudges her thigh with his nose and she pats his head absentmindedly.

 

“It doesn’t have to be peace and quiet,” Cullen says carefully. “You don’t have to be… idle. If you don’t want to.”

 

She gives him a sideways glance. “So you’ll let me do the roof?”

 

The snort comes out before he can stop it and it earns him a scowl. “If you truly think it’s necessary,” he says quickly. “You can do whatever you want.”

 

She sighs and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “I don’t like sitting still like this. Doing _nothing_.”

 

Cullen almost laughs again but stops himself just in time. He’d hardly call it “sitting still”. Lavellan is up all day, busy just with all the tasks to keep them warm and fed and alive. But once again, he understands. It’s not the same.

 

“I was raised to be a Keeper,” she reminds him quietly. “The only clan I have to Keep is you and the beast. It’s what I need to do.”

 

“I understand.” He presses a kiss to her hair, sleep-mussed still. “What do you need me to do?”

 

She ponders on that. “Be kept?” she tries, and Cullen laughs

 

“I could be your kept man, if that’s all you need.”

 

Custard heaves a sigh as though profoundly exhausted of their flirtation. Cullen takes a leaf out of his wife’s book and pays him no mind.

 

 

 

In the end, they agree not to lay new shingles - although Lavellan insists on climbing onto the roof herself to inspect the broken ones. There isn’t a lack of tasks to do around the house, however, and Lavellan sets out to tackle them with grim determination.

 

They expand the garden, even though it’s too late to plant anything of use so late in the summer. After she catches nugs eating their greens one time too many, she lets Custard hunt them while she starts building a fence. She doesn’t use magic and Cullen can’t quite tell if she does it to prolong the task or just to make it more of a challenge.

 

Autumn rushes in quicker than either of them expected, and with it cold winds blowing down from the Frostbacks. Nights are getting longer and colder and while Cullen enjoys the evenings the spend in front of the fire, he can feel Lavellan getting more and more restless.

 

“I should go on a hunt,” she tells him on nights, pressed against his side and her arm slung over his chest.

 

Her skin is still gleaming with sweat and cooling fast so he tugs the blanket over her and pulls her closer. “We still have more than half of the deer you brought home last month.”

 

“We need to get ready for winter. Half a deer won’t see us through.” She pauses for a moment. “I’m thinking of taking Custard with me. It would just be for a few days.”

 

“Days?” She’s never been hunting overnight before. Cullen frowns up at the dark ceiling. “I’m not certain that’s the best idea.”

 

“You’re not my advisor anymore,” she reminds him, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder as she stretches out against him. “You’re my husband, and you need to eat.”

 

“I should come with you,” he says, and his frown deepens when she shakes her head.

 

“It’ll be quicker with just the two of us. Try not to worry too much, Cullen. I killed a darkspawn magister with a party of four, if you’ll recall; a few days’ hunt won’t be the death of me.”

 

“I reserve the right to worry as much as I like,” Cullen protests. But he knows he won’t change her mind, not if it’s set, and falls asleep far more fitfully than she.

 

It takes a few days to prepare for her hunt and Cullen dreads her departure more and more with every one that passes. Lavellan on the other hand only seems to get more excited. She packs supplies and makes potions, more content than he's seen her for weeks.

 

The night before she plans to leave, she pulls out her old bedroll and uses the light of the fire to inspect it.

 

“I was afraid the moths had gotten to it,” she says, satisfied with what she finds.

 

“You make it sound like we’ve been here for years.” Cullen watches her from his spot at the table, a tight knot almost painful in his chest.

 

She shrugs and runs her hand over the fabric one last time before rolling it back up. “We haven’t had much use for it lately.”

 

“A proper bed will have that effect, yes.”

 

She smiles a little and he feels like he can breathe a bit easier.

 

That weightlessness wains when he wakes the next morning to her soft kiss, the touch of a cool prosthetic to his shoulder. “We’re going,” she murmurs, the house black as pitch still. He starts a bit when Custard gives him a few sloppy kisses himself.

 

Cullen sits up and sees them off at the door. They disappear around the house and into the forest, and for a moment, he’s brought back to early mornings in Skyhold where he’d kissed her, long and lingering, before she set off for weeks at a time.

 

He runs a hand through his hair and returns to bed, but not for very long. He’s too listless to fall back asleep. The house is too empty.

 

It isn’t long after dawn that he heads out toward the village. They both have letters to send, and if she’s out preparing provisions for the long, cold winter, then so can he.

 

The people of the village greet him warmly as they always do. They’re used to his and Lavellan’s visits by now and after the first few weeks the novelty of their presence has worn off. Excitement and curiosity has given way to genuine warmth and neighborliness.

 

The miller and his husband invite him over for tea and he stays a lot longer than he intended to. By the time he starts on his way back home, the sun is almost touching the mountain peaks in the west. He knows the way well enough by now to risk taking it even in the dark but he’s still glad for the mule the miller borrows him for his provisions - with promises to return the next week for more tea.

 

It’s a stubborn animal that stops to munch a few handful of grass on the side of the road a couple of times, but not having to carry his packs by himself makes the journey home a lot quicker. The cabin stands quiet and empty in the moonlight when he gets home and he feels Lavellan’s absence even more strongly than he did in the morning.

 

Their home is surrounded by wards of protection, so he feels confident enough to simply tie the mule off at the fence with some water before he makes his way down to the creek with a couple of buckets.

 

He eats the meal leftover from the night before, and falls asleep soon after. His early morning and the trip into town is enough to cast him into a long, deep sleep.

 

Still, when he wakes up the next morning, disoriented and alone, it sets a peculiar mood for the rest of the day. He considers taking the mule back into town if only to keep himself busy, but by the time he’s finished tending to the garden for the day, it’s nearly noon, and far too late.

 

He’s only just sent a letter off to Mia, to his mother, and to Josephine, so with little else to do so soon after lunch, he picks up a book and sits in the sun to read.

 

It’s the definition of peace and quiet, he thinks, not without a bit of bitterness. A big fuzzy bee lands on the open page of his book and crawls around for a bit before taking off again. The afternoon heat is making him feel a little sluggish. He’s read the same sentence four times in the last few minutes and still can’t quite remember what it says. With a sigh, he closes the books and stretches out on the soft grass.

 

He closes his eyes. Even the chirping of the birds sounds lazy, like they can’t muster up the motivation for a proper song.

 

He thinks about what he’d be doing now if he was back in Skyhold. He hasn’t thought about it in a long time, a haze between him and his memories. He remembers the cold. And the worry.

 

It’s not the same now. It’s not like he’s sent her off to fights dragon and demons and all things evil under the sun. He doesn’t worry, not really. But he misses her. The realization comes to him so simple and so sudden, it makes him laugh. A sound just for him and the bees.

 

Peace and quiet mean nothing without her.

 

The day crawls by at an agonizing pace, and he can’t help but wonder if this is how she feels all the time.

 

But he’s mooning, he realizes, and hauls himself up. She’s only been gone for a day and he’s _pining_. The last time he’s felt so embarrassed of himself was likely when he was still beset with too much cowardice to hold her gaze over the war table.

 

He scrubs out the tub just for something to do, and spends an hour hauling water to and from the creek. Without her magic handy, Cullen can only manage one kettle of boiled water at a time. As a result, the bath is lukewarm at best, but he sits inside until he can feel his toes go numb with cold.

 

The mule is as unimpressed with his nudity as Custard, and that is a bizarre comfort.

 

He doesn’t eat much that night - just a bit of the bread and cheese he bought in the village. He even misses Custard’s pleading looks from across the room he give him every time he eats something that even just smells edible to him. Which, to Custard, is pretty much everything.

 

It’s not even fully dark by the time he falls into bed. Even with two blankets he can’t seem to get warm, waking up more than once to reach out to the empty spot beside him.

 

The next day is much like the last, except for the rain that has replaced the sunshine from before and keeps him indoors almost all day.

 

It’s maddening. Before it’s even noon, he’s cleaned the entire cabin and pricked himself with a needle twice while mending the bedding. His boredom has given way to irritation as he paces the room, cooped up like an animal.

 

The only thought that bothers him even more is that she’s out there in the rain.

 

With little else to do, he dozes on top of the bedding. He doesn’t know how long he’s out before he’s startled awake by a pair of thuds outside beyond the walls of the bedroom.

 

He ducks into the closet for his sword just in case, and when he opens the front door, his wife is staring back at him, drenched to the bone.

 

“Why is there a mule in the storehouse?”

 

Cullen drops his sword against the wall and pulls her inside, sweeping her to his chest. “Because it’s raining,” he answers, somewhat belatedly. She pats his back with her iron hand. In the other is a brace of rabbits.

“I don’t really feel like I’ve been properly answered, but - Custard, don’t you dare.”

 

Custard stands dripping in the middle of the kitchen floor, his body poised and ready to shake. He looks like he’s about to ignore her and whines. “Stop crying, you furry child. We’re both wet,” she grouses, extricating herself from Cullen’s arms. He takes the rabbits from her - five of them - and waves a hand over Custard’s body. Waves of heat fill the room and soon enough, Custard’s short fur stops dripping. The house still reeks of wet dog, but at least it isn’t drenched.

 

“I didn’t think you’d be back so soon,” Cullen says a little sheepishly. He doesn’t know what to do with the rabbits when all he wants is to pull her into his arms again.

 

“It was a good hunt,” she says and takes off her coat, giving it the same treatment as Custard before hanging it over one of the chairs. “But bad weather.”

 

“Ah.” His throat feels tight.

 

She halts in her movements and looks at him. “Are you alright?”

 

He moves to nod but then shakes his head instead. “I missed you.” Ignoring her protests, he puts the rabbits down on the table and closes the distance between them with a few quick steps.

 

She’s still wet, with water dripping out of her hair and her face cold from the wind when he kisses her. She makes a noise of surprise when he pulls her in but just a moment later she relaxes, leaning into him.

 

“Your clothes are getting wet,” she mumbles once she gets the chance.

 

“I don’t care.”

 

She laughs and the sound of it makes his heart beat wildly in his chest. She holds on to the fabric of his shirt but pushes him back a bit. “I haven’t been gone for that long.”

 

“Long enough,” he protests and ducks in to kiss her again.

 

She allows it, though she doesn’t hold him, but that’s alright. She does stop him when he slips a hand under her shirt to the naked small of her back, though, which is less than ideal. “Cullen,” she admonishes, amused and flustered but woefully firm. “I’ve been in the woods for three days. I’m filthy.”

 

He doesn’t care, and she must see it in his face because she snorts and pushes him further back. “I’ve been carrying dead animals for days. I haven’t even washed my hands. I think there’s blood in the joints of my prosthetic.”

 

“I’ll draw a bath for - ah.” He grins sheepishly. “I suppose that isn’t necessary.”

 

“A little ice and fire will do the trick,” she agrees, but with a little smile she steps up close and kisses his chin. “I missed you too. Let me wash the gore from my body and I’ll return your greeting.”

 

He puts clean sheets on the bed while she’s in the bath, his hands shaking and his heart still beating fast. Custard is pacing around the cabin, sniffing every corner as if anything could have fundamentally changed in his absence.

 

She’s gone longer than usual and he’s almost tempted to go to the bath himself to check on her, when she comes back into the cabin. Her skin’s still steaming from the heat of the bath and her hair is just as wet as before - only now it smells of soap instead of sweat and deer. She runs her fingers over it just like she did with Custard and her coat to make it dry faster.

 

She’s cleaned her prosthetic as well but leaves it on the kitchen table, gingerly rolling her left shoulder to get the stiffness out of it.

 

“You’ve cleaned the cabin,” she says when Cullen steps out of the bedroom.

 

“Twice,” he admits. And then, when she raises an eyebrow, “I had the time.”

 

She smiles a little and rises on the tips of her toes to kiss him. She’s got an arm over his shoulders, and he lifts her up until her feet come up off the floor. Lavellan gasps, “Who are you showing off for?” and makes a noise when he rubs his week-old beard along the side of her neck.

 

“The house was very empty without you,” he tells her petulantly, though he does lower her back to the floor. “I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

 

“So you cleaned the house twice, and… stole a mule?”

 

“It was lent to me,” he insists.

 

“For your loneliness?”

 

“You’re teasing me now,” he grouses, squeezing her close again.

 

“I would never,” she says. Her voice is thick with amusement. “We brought home two does and a pheasant as well, but there’s no room for them thanks to your mule companion.”

 

“I’ll take him back tomorrow,” Cullen swears, leaning into the hand in his hair.

 

“And they will arrest you on the spot?” She tugs at his hair. “Just imagine. The former Inquisition’s commander! A common mule thief!”

 

“The scandal.”

 

“The Orlesians will be delighted. I’m sure they’ve been bored out their minds with us in here in hiding.”

 

Cullen rolls his eyes but can’t resist sneaking in another kiss. She smiles against his lips and when he licks into her mouth he even draws a little moan from her.

 

He’ll get a crick in his neck like this but he doesn’t really care. It’s only when she presses herself even closer to him that he thinks to pick her up. She laughs when he lifts her but slings her legs around him and holds on to his shoulders.

 

“Show-off,” she says before tipping up his chin for another kiss.


	2. Chapter 2

Late autumn makes everything so much worse.

 

The garden is hibernating, the storehouse is full, the cabin is perfectly intact. She feels like she’s been sitting on her hands since early summer. 

 

Lavellan can’t remember a time she’s felt so useless in her agitation. Truth be told, everything she’s done to remedy her restless hands has only made it worse - solidified the permanence of her situation. 

 

She hadn’t thought they’d remain for so long. Every little modification, every swing of the hammer, tells her how few plans they have to leave. 

 

She loves the house - as much as anyone can love an assortment of wood and bricks and mortar. There comes a sort of pride with it, she thinks. Building something with your hands, something so solid and lasting. But the thought doesn’t make her sleep easier at night. 

 

She accompanies Cullen to the village more often now, even though the visits leave her more drained than any hunting trip could. The villagers have gotten used to their presence but her title still shields her from revealing just how unsociable she really is. She mostly sticks to asking for advice and the locals seem happy enough to share their knowledge with the former Inquisitor. 

 

But winter is just around the corner. She can already taste the snow in the winds coming down from the mountains. Within the month the roads will be nearly impassable. 

 

Her hunting trips are the only thing keeping her sane. They are short, rarely yielding more than a rabbit or two, but they get her out of the house and into the woods where breathing just seems so much easier. 

 

It’s there that she first notices the owls. 

 

In the hollow of a very large, very old tree is a nest, and on her frequent trips she’s seen them tucked up inside or resting on the branches of the tree. She sees them in the dark just as they see her. 

 

The barn owls are beautiful in their own way, she thinks, with the soft earthy colors of their feathers and the wise old darkness of their eyes.

 

She watches them take off, their great wings wide and graceful, and something in her grows taut with longing. They remain as they choose, and depart as they see fit. They build their homes wherever they desire. She was like that, once - with her clan, then with her companions in the Inquisition.

 

She doesn’t really know what to do with her restless feet now, but she thinks: how nice it would be to simply fly.

 

She’s never resented the loss of her arm. Or at least she hasn’t in a long while. It’s never kept her from working or doing what she wants. With the prosthetic Dagna crafted for her and countless hours of training she learned to work around it, work with it. There more moments of frustration - more than she’d care to admit. But she’s never felt as limited in her own body as when she watches the owls fly. 

 

That night, she lies awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Cullen next to her sleeps soundly, his breathing calm and steady. She turns her head. She can see his features clearly in the dark, utterly peaceful. There have been less nightmares for him since they came here. She can tell even though they’ve never talked about it. Where he once used to toss and turn, clench his teeth or call out, he now sleeps soundly through the night. The nights she finds him sitting on the edge of the bed, pale and shaking, are few and far between. 

 

Being here is good for him. He loves the house... as anyone who’s found a home. 

 

She looks back at the ceiling, the thin blanket on top of her suddenly as heavy as if it was made of lead. 

 

She only needs something to do. Something to keep her busy. She’s struggled for survival, and she’s lived in luxury, but this odd in-between space is so very strange to her. What she needs is purpose.

 

As she often does these days, she falls asleep feeling too big for her skin.

 

The thought comes to her at an odd moment one bright, clear day. Lavellan isn’t hunting; the forest called to her out of leisure rather than necessity, and for once she’s alone. The letter from Dorian they’d collected from town is foremost on her mind when she passes the barn owl tree.

 

She looks up out of habit to observe them, and a remark of Dorian’s comes to her.  _ Transmogrification was the second strangest trend I’d missed during my time in the South. Maevaris pops into the body of a lynx at times to startle me, though she’d never admit it. Far worse than this, if you should believe it, was a resurgence of mustard yellow -  _

 

A dark pair of eyes regard her from the hollow, and she knows what she must do.

 

She doesn’t quite know where to start. It’s not an easy discipline, even if she had the right books or a teacher. All she has for now is her memory and she doesn’t know enough people who have mastered this specific ritual to be entirely confident in that. 

 

For a moment, she considers asking Dorian. He’d certainly recommend her a pile of books - all of them “inferior translation from Tevene”, no doubt. But it’s never been her prefered way of learning new spells. 

 

She knows the basic components of the ritual, in theory. Knowing the animal, however, was a completely different matter. 

 

“You’re spending a lot of time out in the woods,” Cullen remarks as she helps him mend the fence around the garden. It’s been pushed down by the wind the night before and the nugs already took the opportunity to massacre their last row of kale that survived the first frost. 

 

“It’s my natural element,” she tells him blandly. He chuckles, low and deep, so she smiles too.

 

“You’re always in your natural element,” he argues, light-hearted. 

 

“Were you at Halamshiral too, or was that a fever dream?”

 

Cullen makes a noise of derision. “The Winter Palace isn’t the natural element of any decent person.”

 

“Hmm. Are you suggesting that Josephine and Leliana transcend decency?”

 

He levels her with a look, shaking the mallet in her direction. “You,” he says, “are changing the subject, and trying to get me in trouble.”

 

“Trouble? With Josephine and Leliana? Never.” She smiles as sweetly as she can. It makes him laugh but unfortunately he does not drop the topic. 

 

“So what are you doing out there in your natural element?” He positions one of the fence posts the storm has ripped out of the ground. 

 

She pauses for a moment, not certain how to put her desire into words. She doesn’t want to lie. There’s no reason to. “I’m working on a new spell.” 

 

Cullen pauses, the mallet already lifted. “Out in the woods?” 

 

“It’s… necessary. For this sort of spell.” 

 

He lowers the mallet. “It’s not dangerous, is it?” 

 

Irritation bristles in her chest before she can take a breath and smooth it back down. “No,” she says and tries her best to hide her irritation. “Not like that.”

 

He looks from her to the mallet and then to her knees before he finally catches her eyes again. “I don’t mean… that is, I’m not suspicious of… of your intentions. I only… your safety is my concern, and -”

 

“Cullen.” He stops talking. His face colors, but the look in his eyes is earnest. “There’s nothing to fear, for you or for me. No more than any other magic. That may not comfort you, but I’m going to ask you to trust me.”

 

He rubs the back of his neck, freckled from all the year’s work in the sun. “Is there a reason you can’t tell me?”

 

“No,” she admits, taking the mallet from his hands to resume work on the fence herself. “It will be a surprise. For us both.”

 

He looks like he wants to say something but then he takes a deep breath and grips the fence to hold it steady for her. “I do,” he says, a little quieter. “Trust you, I mean.” 

 

“Thank you,” she says and rams the fence post into the frozen earth. 

  
  
  
  
  


She considers taking Custard with her, more for his sake than for hers, but decides against it when his barking only makes the owls retreat further into their tree. So she leaves him with Cullen and makes her trips into the forest by herself. 

 

It’s a nice, comfortable silence, one she is used to. Fereldan forests are different from the ones she’s used to in the North, but the feeling is similar. She finds herself falling back into familiar movements as the makes her way through the underbrush. 

 

Climbing trees proves a little more difficult with her prosthetic but after a few attempts she succeeds even in that. She finds a spot high up in a nearby beech, on a branch thick enough to sit comfortably on for several hours. Autumn has rid it of its leaves and left her a clear view on the owls’ tree. 

 

She spends a great deal of time there, every day, for weeks. The owls are so familiar with her by the first snowfall that on occasion, they’ll land upon her long branch as well. She observes them - their habits, their interactions with one another, the way they move and sleep and hunt. She meets their eyes when she’s permitted, and finds something calling to her there.

 

Cullen worries - she knows he does. But he doesn’t protest, for which she’s eternally grateful. 

 

She leaves and greets him with a kiss, and beyond the hours she disappears into the forest, their life together is quite normal. 

 

Lavellan can’t help but wonder, when she sees the eggs from the nest have hatched, if nature has ill timing. Surely the winter will be too cold for creatures so new and so small to survive. But with their arrival, she sees another side to the subjects of her study. 

 

The owlets are ugly little things with beaks too big for the scrawny little bodies and barely covered by down. There are four of them and Lavellan only gets a short glimpse at them before the mother hides them view, pushing them deeper into the hollow tree. But she can still hear the soft chittering sound coming from the nest, even over the sound of the wind. 

 

There’s a protectiveness she hasn’t seen yet from the adult owls. Where there has almost been something like trust before, she’s now met with outright suspicion. They allow her to keep watching but she’s aware that her every move is constantly scrutinized by the mother. When the male comes home from the hunt, he stands guards while his partner feeds the little ones, his eyes always returning to Lavellan in the opposite tree. 

 

The little owls grow quickly and by the next time she gets a good look at them, they’ve turned into little balls of white fluff. They’re just as demanding as they were the day they hatched, their cries to call to their parents growing louder every day. 

 

The temperature drops considerably a month after the hatching and Lavellan starts to worry. Cullen does as well. At his urging, she takes a blanket with her to her spot in the tree. It calms him more than it keeps her warm but she doesn’t argue. She’s starting to think that the owlets are in more need of the blanket than she is. They’re covered in thick white down but even with their mother constantly shielding them from the icy winds, they appear less lively with every day. 

 

But this, she knows, is nature. They will survive, or they will not.

 

It’s a mild enough day with light snowfall and the barest of breezes that she’s finally struck by inspiration. The mother returns from her hunt, as she always does, but something in the way her wide wings buffet the snowflakes sends sparks through Lavellan’s body. 

 

For the first time since this endeavor began, she focuses her magic inward.

 

She doesn’t change. Not at first. But with patience and the strength of her focus, she knows she is close. Her vision grows sharper, though she doesn’t know if that’s the magic or the influence of the owl. Her heart bursts with desperation to fly, and for a moment, she believes she truly can. 

 

And then she stops. Impatient as she may be, she’s no fool. The spell will take time to perfect, for someone performing it so haphazardly, and it isn’t wise to apply force with no direction.

 

Still, she throws herself at Cullen the moment she returns. She feels lighter, be it elation or magic, and even after she takes him to bed, the sensation hasn’t faded. She supposes she’s missed the intricacies of magic, using it simply for the day-to-day; the power of its utility, all of its possibilities, make her light as air.

 

“You look happy,” Cullen says as he pulls a blanket over them both. 

 

“I am.” She rolls onto her side, one leg between his and her arm slung over his stomach. He’s softer than he used to be - the result of good food and more sleep and happiness. 

 

He runs his fingers through her hair as she rests her head on his chest. His heartbeat is strong and steady. She thinks she knows it better than her own. 

  
  
  
  


Two months after the hatching, one of the owlets dies. Lavellan isn’t there - she wouldn’t have even noticed if she hadn’t become so familiar with them over all this time. She knows something’s wrong as soon as she settles down in her spot in the beech tree. And sure enough, when the mother moves to make way for her partner’s landing, she spots the little ones. Only three hungry beaks and no sign of the fourth. 

 

She later finds it, half covered by snow at the base of the trunk. Soft down gently swaying in the breeze. She leaves it for whatever animal is brave enough to claim it. 

 

If owls mourn their dead, they don’t show it. Life goes on and the remaining owlets grow with every day. Their snow white down gives way to first real feathers, patchy and ruffled but already in the beautiful cream color of their parents. They grow bold, often hopping to the edge of the nest despite their mother’s warnings. Lavellan watches them stretch their wings for the first time. None of them are brave enough to jump quite yet but she recognizes the excitement in their movements, the impatience in their cries. 

 

She grows with them, she thinks, closer and closer every day to her goal, becoming and becoming. 

 

When it happens, it’s like a sigh. 

 

She breathes in with her magic, and slowly, with feeling, the spell blooms and shapes her corporeality. The mystification of the moment lasts only as long as it takes for her to realize she’s slipping from the beech tree. Her arms - wings - lift on instinct, and her feet dig into the branch.

 

Talons that they are, they keep her rooted where she sits. In fact, it’s more challenging to pull herself free than it is to keep still. 

 

Her mind is both sharper and muddled, and it’s a faint thought that nearly slips past her that her wings are whole. It had been a fear, a consideration, that they might not be. 

 

But she spreads them wide and her heart lifts with her body when she steps off of the branch, and she flies.

 

It should be more difficult, she thinks just before she breaks through the canopy above and stops thinking altogether. It’s instinct, too similar to the owl’s own to make the distinction. She’s watched them for so long, their movements have become second nature to her. 

 

Her wings are a perfect design from the strong muscles in her back to the elegant tips of her feathers, carrying her far above the trees with just a few powerful beats. They make her feel the smallest fluctuation in the wind and when it gets a little too strong, she simply dips down to a lower altitude just above tree tops. 

 

Her eyes are better although she can’t quite remember what looking through elven eyes was like. The smallest movements below come into sharp focus whenever she wills it. The urge to hunt that she’s felt like a vague longing in the last few months, sits at the back of her neck like a hand pressing her forward. 

 

But it’s nothing compared to the weightlessness she feels, magic running through every cell of her body. A body she’s built by herself. No, not just built. Willed into existence. 

 

She takes a sharp turn when the tree tops turn into the telltale darkness of fir trees. She’s flown too far south already, further and further away from the owl tree. And the house. 

 

It doesn’t take long for her to spot it, just beyond the line where the forest gives way to field and soft hills all the way down to the village in the distance. 

 

She crosses so much space so easily like this, so freely. Time passes in a way she can’t entirely grasp, but she knows that even on horseback, she wouldn’t make it from the village to the cabin in so short a time. 

 

It’s only when she lands on the rooftop of her own home that she realizes how long she must have flown, stretching muscles she simply hasn’t had before, because she aches. But it’s a good feeling, this exhaustion. She wants to lay down, but she can’t.

 

Until she can. Lavellan feels the spell unwind and flops back against the shingles, arms outstretched. She hasn’t conjured a new one to replace the wing, but it doesn’t much matter. Her prosthetic is gone though she took it with her this morning - it must have fallen in the woods, she thinks, and considers going after it. Then, she figures she can give it a few more moments.

 

Her body feels stretched, too big and too small, but the elation hasn’t dimmed. 

 

Cullen finds her like this with a start - sprawled across the roof, grinning like a loon.

 

He calls her name twice before she hears him, blood still rushing loudly in her ears. But when she does, she sits ups despite the muscles in her shoulders protesting. 

 

“I thought a griffin had landed on the roof.” Cullen laughs through his confusion but she knows him well enough to see the all the signs of worry in his face, even from this far away. He pulls his coat tighter around his body. Only now does she realize she should probably be colder than she is. She left the blanket and her second coat back by the tree and she lost her glove, but she feels comfortably warm. She can still feel residual magic flowing through her, making the tips of her fingers tingle.

 

“Not quite!” she calls back and begins sliding down the side of the roof. Before Cullen can do much more than give a shout of warning, she’s jumped off the edge and landed in the snow piled up high against the side of the cabin. 

 

Cullen comes to her side before she’s even gotten up, helping her stand. He makes no effort to hide the worry now. “Are you alright? What happened?”

 

Her face hurts with the force of her smile. She laughs, giddy, and laughs even more at how deeply the worry creases Cullen’s face.

 

“My spell worked,” she says, kissing his face again and again. He pats her back.

 

“That’s… well, I’m pleased you - where’s your arm?”

 

“In the woods.”

 

He makes and inquisitive noise and she buries her face in his shoulder. He smells… well, like dog. She turns and presses her nose to his neck, where he smells less like dog and more like himself. 

 

“Are you going to tell me what you’ve done?” he asks, tentatively amused by her shaking once he knows it’s of laughter. 

 

“I’ve taught myself a school of magic,” she says, grinning against his skin. “Experimentally. It was a success.”

 

He wraps his arms around her, shielding her from the cold she still doesn’t feel. “And this… school of magic includes sitting on the roof?” 

 

Another bout of laughter shakes her. “In a way.”

 

He leads her inside, more for his benefit than her own, and she can’t help but think that the door closing behind them feels wrong. It’s warm inside. Cullen must have had the fire burning all morning. The smell of coffee is strong in the air - a Satinalia gift from Dorian. 

 

She begins telling Cullen about the owls, slowly like she’s telling him a dream she’s just awoken from. He listens and keeps his hands busy with brewing a new pot of coffee while he does. She tries to sit for a while but finds she’s too restless - her body still brimming with magic and adrenaline. So she paces the room instead, only stopping from time to time to brush her fingers against Cullen’s arm or press a kiss against his shoulder as he works. 

 

Custard lies underneath the kitchen table, wagging his tail more out of confusion than excitement and not sure what to make of the energy in the room. 

 

When she’s through telling him the ins and outs of her excursions, there’s an amused look on his face. The tiniest smile.

 

“You could have told me earlier, you know,” he chastises teasingly. “I was a Templar. They schooled us in magic. I know a bit about transmogrification.”

 

Lavellan sips at her coffee as she paces. “Mmh, and how to dispel it and subdue the transmogrifer in question, I’m sure. It wasn’t truly a secret, Cullen - I only wanted to be sure I could do it before I boasted that it would be done.”

 

Cullen’s laughter is quiet, and he presses a hand to her cheek. “We need to find your arm. And then perhaps you might show me your new talents.”

 

They find her arm underneath her beech tree in the snow, together with her coat and blanket. Somewhere far above them, the owls are shuffling about, but it’s difficult to get a clear view of them from the ground. 

 

Lavellan turns around to find Cullen staring up into the branches of the beech, a steep line between his eyebrows. “What?” she asks as she rolls her prosthetic into the blanket. 

 

“That’s where you sat all this time? All the way up there?” 

 

She steps closer to take his hand in hers. “I’ll fly much higher than that.” 

 

He groans, the grip on her hand tightening for a moment. “Don’t remind me.” 

 

It takes a little longer now, just a little bit more effort to get into the right mindset. Some of it might have to do with Cullen’s presence. And some of it with the fact that she needs to envision the owls now rather than watch them. 

 

She closes her eyes and takes deep breaths. The sound of melting snow dripping around her. The hooting of the owls above. And then it’s like the last time. 

 

Cullen doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself, watching his wife become an owl. At first he tries to scramble her up into his arms, before he haltingly releases her as though she shouldn’t be held. When she nearly drops to the ground, he makes another grab for her in a move that seems purely instinctive - in return, her wings spread to balance herself, her claws grasping for purchase. 

 

She hears him hiss, and tries to right herself in his jerking arm. 

 

“Maker’s breath,” he huffs, wincing. He holds his arm out at an awkward length to observe her. “That’s… extraordinary. We learned of such things, but I’ve never… up close, I haven’t… you have both wings?”

 

She spreads them again proudly, though when she shifts her weight he grimaces. “Alright then,” he breathes, looking up. “Show me how you fly.”

 

She shifts her weight once more, trying to find the perfect position. He keeps his arm outstretched and after another moment of hesitation she flaps her wings and leaps. She can hear him gasp behind her. 

 

It’s a little more difficult to gain altitude when she’s not taking off from a high branch but after a short while of avoiding tree trunks and bushes, she manages to pull herself up and out of the trees. She passes the owls’ hollow tree just in time to see the male take off for his hunt. He startles when he sees her but only for a second before accompanying her for a round just above the treetops. He doesn’t seem concerned or suspicious but rather curious. When she doesn’t make any attempt at interacting with him, he turns and takes off in the direction of the mountains. 

 

She can hear Cullen’s voice calling out to her from somewhere below and dives back down into the forest. She finds him where she left him, standing a little sheepishly in front of the beech tree. 

 

Landing is a lot more difficult than anticipated and despite her best efforts she hits the snow in front of him with enough force to make him shriek. 

 

He crowds over her, cupping his hand to her back and she shifts with a pop back into place. 

 

“Are you alright?” he asks, cupping her shoulders when she’s returned to herself. She allows him to help her stand.    
  


“I’m perfectly fine.” She brushes some snow off of his shoulder, grinning like a fool. It drops when she sees the state of his arm.

 

His coat is torn through, blood seeping through the fabric. She’d mangled him with her claws, she realizes, and curses. 

 

“It looks worse than it is,” Cullen says, transitioning from concern to comfort in a blink. She waves him off and draws what little healing magic she can to patch his bloodied skin. She’s never had any great talent at healing, but when she’s done all she can, she raises his arm to kiss his hastily patched skin. 

 

“I’m sorry,” she says, guilt twisting in her stomach despite his reassurances. 

 

“I’m alright. See?” He wiggles his fingers before cupping the side of her face. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you.” 

 

She sighs and leans into him. There’s still a bit of magic fluttering in her chest, urging her to go on and on, but she allows Cullen to pull her into his arms. “I suppose I still have some things to learn.” 

 

She feels him laughing rather than she hears it. “You have all the time in the world to practice.” 

 

His coat still smells like dog but she buries her face in it. All the time in the world means nothing to her when all she wants to do is soar above the trees again, even though her shoulders ache and she finally feels the cold creeping into her body. 

 

“So what’s it like?” Cullen asks on their way back to the cabin. “Flying.”

 

He’s got her arm tucked in the blanket under his, but she doesn’t feel too lost without it. She makes a thoughtful noise.

 

“Imagine being very, very high above the ground with nothing under your feet. Then, imagine that that is perfectly safe and natural as long as you don’t stop moving.”

 

“Ah… no, thank you.”

 

She laughs quietly, looping her arm through the crook of his elbow. “I’ll do the flying for the both of us, then.”

 

“This is what’s made you so happy, all this time,” he says, folding a gloved hand over her fingers. “We could find you books on more schools of magic, if you intend to continue adding to your many skills.”

 

“If I’m not mistaken, the time for flattery began long before we married.”

 

“Can I not simply be impressed with my wife? Please allow me this. There are so few people to whom I can brag about you. Custard is sick of hearing about it.” 

 

She snorts and bumps her hip into his thigh as the walk. “One of these days he’s going to tire of us and take off into the forest by himself.” 

 

Custard proves her mistaken as soon as they get close enough to the cabin to hear him scratching at the door. When Cullen opens it, the dog greets both of them as if they’d been gone for weeks. 

 

“We didn’t leave you alone for more than an hour, you silly beast,” Lavellan says as she tries to keep him from licking her hand. “You’re a war hound, not a child.” 

 

Cullen laughs, using Custard’s momentary focus on Lavellan to slip past him and to the kettle to make some tea. 

 

After she closes the door, Lavellan considers the blanket bundled around her prosthetic on the table. After a moment of consideration, she leaves it where it is to wander behind Cullen. She wraps her arms around his middle, resting a cheek between his shoulders. She feels him shift as he removes his gloves and smooths his bare hand over hers. 

 

“You’re very good at making tea,” she tells him, closing her eyes. “If we’re being complimentary now.”

 

“Thank you,” he tells her, his voice thick with amusement. “You’re very good at being complimentary.”

 

“You’re very good at taking compliments.” 

 

Custard makes a noise, sitting beside them expectantly. Lavellan clicks her tongue. “And you’re very good at being a nuisance.”

 

He looks at her and cocks his head, letting out a quiet drawn out whine. 

 

“He’s still upset we left him here,” Cullen says with much more sympathy than the dog deserves. 

 

“For an hour.” Lavellan tries to push Custard away with her foot but the beast won’t budge. If anything he comes closer, pressing his nose against Cullen’s leg. When Cullen gives in and scratches him behind the ears, Lavellan rolls her eyes. “That’s why. You’re too soft with him.”

 

“Oh, are we done with the compliments?” He still has his back to her but she can hear the amusement in his voice. 

 

“I’ll give compliments where they are due.” She sighs and squeezes him a little more tightly. He’s warm and solid, a perfect anchor to her weightlessness. 

 

Custard switches his attention to her and boldly squeezes himself between them to lay down on her feet. 

 

“A nuisance,” she repeats, kissing the back of Cullen’s neck. Lavellan be remiss not to admit that perhaps Custard anchors her, too, but that is fine with her. No need to encourage him.

  
  
  
  
  


She writes to Dorian of her newfound skill, and in the time she awaits his reply, she is almost always owl. In this body, Lavellan can stand the cold far longer than Cullen - they will walk most days to the edge of the forest where she leaves him with the beat of her new wings. There’s nothing more they can do with the house in winter, and Cullen has Custard for company. 

 

When Dorian’s letter comes, he begins as he does with admonishment -  _ Where following the trends of high society are concerned, perhaps not quite so literally, dear Inquisitor. How boldly gauche of you. _ \- but quickly devolves into energetic praise. He demands to know more, accusing her of withholding the meat of her experiment. _ In detail, if you would! Please resist the urge to be so very succinct. _

 

She tries her best, wasting ink and paper in the process, but she lacks the vocabulary to explain how she approached the spell. Or perhaps Dorian lacks hers. It’s nothing new, they ran into similar problems during the war. Dorian’s talk of magical theory and carefully constructed spells frustrated her, just like he struggled to understand the Dalish principles of magic. In the end, they were always able to resort to gesturing to help the other understand. In written form, she doesn’t even know where to start. 

 

She leans back in her chair, the squeaking of it now almost comfortingly familiar. She can hear Cullen walking outside and talking to Custard. With a sigh, she looks back at the attempted letter in front of her. Just for a moment, she imagines herself high up above the Waking Sea, strong wings carrying her further and further north. 

 

It’s no use. She’d never be able to keep up the spell under that kind of physical strain. She’d hardly made it out of Ferelden. 

 

The sound of Cullen’s laughter comes through the window and the house feels far too small all of a sudden. 

 

Lavellan abandons the letter for the moment and wanders outside for a breath of fresh air. Cullen launches a ball toward the plains and Custard races after it like an arrow loosed from its bow.

 

It’s a bit of a search for Custard to find his ball in the tall grass and melting snow. They watch him sniff around for it with a single-minded sort of determination.

 

“There are other ways to hone a war hound’s skills,” she wagers. “More practical ones.”   
  
“Maker willing, he’ll never see a war,” Cullen says with a grin. Lavellan is quietly startled that she doesn’t entirely agree. 

 

She stands beside him in silence, picking over her own thoughts as Custard races back with his prize and Cullen winds up to throw the ball in a different direction. It isn’t as though she wants a war - the fighting, the bloodshed, the political manoeuvres she could do without. No ancient evil scourges. No more unnecessary death. 

 

But… something to leap into with both feet. Something to necessitate skill, strategy. Something important. A purpose.  

 

“Did you finish your letter to Dorian?” Cullen asks, breaking into her thoughts. He smiles at her like a painting come to life, lit by the sun. 

 

Her chest feels tight with a longing she can’t quite put into words. “Not yet,” she says and then, for the sake of being honest, “I felt a little restless.”

 

“Are you going flying?” 

 

He says it so casually, not even losing his smile, and anger flares up inside her belly, white hot and unexpected. It dies down as quickly as it came but it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. She takes a deep breath. It’s not his fault. How could he possibly understand the scope of the problem if she doesn’t understand it herself?

 

For the first time, flying over the forest doesn’t bring her the kind of joy she’s gotten so used to. She knows the trees and clearings below her. She can even predict how the Western winds are going to behave by now. 

 

There’s no point to it. 

 

Her wings carry her back to where all this started - the hollow tree. She hasn’t been here in a while but she’s seen the owls flying in the distance from time to time. Much more gracefully than on her last visit, she lands on the familiar branch of the beech tree. 

 

The first thing she notices is how quiet it is. She still remembers the squawking and hooting of the owlets, always scuffling and demanding food. There’s nothing of that now. She hops to the edge of the branch to get a better look. 

 

The mother sits at the edge of the nest, calm and beautiful like the first day Lavellan saw her. But behind her, the nest is empty. 

 

Of course, Lavellan thinks and feels the spell unravel around her, slipping from her shoulders like a heavy coat. They’re gone. They must have been for weeks. Even the last time she saw them, they were almost grown. Too big for their mother’s nest. 

 

She peers at Lavellan with those dark, unknowable eyes. Lavellan wonders why she doesn’t fly - why she sits and stays when she could fly until her wings won’t beat, and make her nest somewhere new. 

 

Her mate must prefer this tree in particular, Lavellan thinks with a quiet snort. And then she grimaces. Perhaps not her proudest moment, projecting her feelings on a pair of owls.

 

The sun dips low on the horizon and the world is purple and smoke-blue when she finally wanders home. Her bare toes are nearly frozen, but she prefers the walk to flight. Would it not distress Cullen, she thinks she’d prefer to sleep outdoors where she could see the stars, feel every shift of the wind.

 

But it would distress him, so she pushes her way through the door of the cabin and locks it behind her as though she’s signing her own sentence. 

 

A home, she thinks, shouldn’t feel like a cell.

 

It clearly doesn’t bother Cullen, who greets her with a smile and a cup of tea. 

 

“You were gone longer than you usually are,” he says when she sits across from him at the table. It’s a careful statement, one that doesn’t dim his smile, but there’s worry in his eyes. 

 

“Yes,” she says and shifts in her seat. The wool of her clothes is damp from the melting snow and makers her skin itch in the warmth of the hearthfire. They feel too tight. The cup of tea in front of her is also hot and she dreads touching it, keeping her hand in her lap instead. 

 

“Did something happen?” The worry in Cullen’s eyes has spread, swallowing his smile. 

 

She thinks of ways to say the words out loud, all the things she feels, without hurting him. Without making worry even more. But still making him understand. “I went to see the owls,” she says finally. 

 

“Oh?” Cullen blinks. It’s clear he expected her to tell him something else. 

 

“They’re gone. They’re…” She pauses and clicks her tongue in annoyance as the words fail her. “Not the parents. But the little ones. They’ve left.” 

 

Cullen looks confused, a little line in between his eyebrows as he waits for her to continue. She shares his confusion, if she’s honest with herself. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling, or why she feels so discontent. She doesn’t know why this has festered inside her for so long - why she can’t find happiness as easily as he can here.

 

Are they not the same? Do they not share the burden of their pasts, their victories, their unforeseen future? Do they not understand one another with so few words between them? Isn’t that how it’s always been?

 

But Cullen has found peace where she has not. He’s found a home where she’s found a cage. 

 

He’s happier than she’s ever seen him, and every day he grows happier still. The pale, gaunt soldier she once knew has made way for a smiling man, a man pleased enough just to have food on the table and a garden to tend. A dog and a wife.

 

So she stares into her tea and waves the only hand she’s got. “It’s nothing.”

 

It’s not what they do. It hasn’t been for years. The silence and the unspoken things between them. The fear of saying something and breaking what cannot be repaired. 

 

It’s not what they do and perhaps that’s why Cullen doesn’t push. 

 

He takes a sip of tea but keeps his eyes on her. “I’m surprised they stayed as long as they did,” he says, his tone purposefully light. 

 

“What?” 

 

“The owls. But maybe their parents didn’t want to let them go. It can’t be easy. Fighting so hard just to get your children through the winter and then watching them leave for good as soon as the snow melts.” He laughs quietly, almost as if at a private joke. 

 

She watches him from across the table, her nails digging into the flesh of her palm until it hurts. He’s rambling, trying to bridge whatever cleft she opened between them. She’s never been particularly good at mending awkward gaps in conversation - something they share. And there’s no one around now to fill that void for her.

 

“They’re owls,” she says, instead of something tactful. “I doubt our sort of sentiment runs so deep.”

 

He grins wryly, that scar twisting with his lips. “You’re right. I believe I am feeling sentimental.” Cullen rubs at the back of his neck, glancing over at the fire. It’s been a long time since he’s avoided her gaze. If she’s honest, she’s grateful for it now.

 

“More than the owls,” she agrees quietly, placing her hand around the cup. 

 

“Have you… that is, you watched the owls for so long,” Cullen bumbles suddenly. It may be a trick of the light, but she thinks he might be going a little red. “You’ve… observed them. Their, ah. Their offspring. Did you perhaps consider....”

 

She thinks of the fourth one, tumbling to its death in the snow, and wonders where he could possibly be going with this. 

 

It must show in her face because he starts talking again almost immediately, definitely blushing now. “I know we haven’t talked about it since… since before the war ended. And I know things were different back then. I was different.” 

 

She remembers. Cullen, still gaunt and sleepless next to her in bed, whispering his dreams into the safety of darkness. The future they spoke of that could only exist in those hours before dawn - before morning brought them back to reality, a world where none of it could ever be. 

 

“Cullen…” She doesn’t know what else to say. 

 

“I was just wondering… if perhaps you’ve given it more thought.” 

 

“No.” It’s the first true lie she’s told him in a long time. Because she has thought about it. How could she have not? When she looks at him, so happy and content, building the life he’s never even dared to dream of. A house. A family. Not just a wife who feels her throat close up at the mere mention of children. Who looks at what he built for her and only sees a prison. 

 

But if she says it out loud, there’s no taking it back.

 

He swallows and nods. Resigned. 

 

Lavellan stands abruptly, pacing to the door. She’d like to leave. She’d like that more than anything. But so too does she detest the idea of leaving this to sit and stew. Neither of them have ever been very good at retreating when resolution is within reach. 

 

“Cullen,” she says again, frowning at the door. “That… isn’t true. But it isn’t something I can… it isn’t a consideration, for me. Not now.”

 

“Alright,” he says, softly. She closes her eyes at the pit in her throat.    
  


“Alright,” she repeats. 

 

“It is alright,” he goes on, and Cullen’s chair creaks with his movement. “But I’d… I’d like to know why. What I can do. If there is anything I can do.”

 

She turns around. He’s standing next to the table, one hand on the edge of it like he needs the support. He looks at her with all the patience in the world and she doesn’t know how anyone could possibly love someone this much and still remember how to breathe. She’s takes a shuddering breath. How can she be so full of fear and full of love at the same time and not crack open right there and then, pour out on the floor between them?

 

“If I do…” Her voice sounds strange like it’s coming from far away and not out of her own mouth. “If we have a child here, we’ll never leave.” 

 

Cullen blinks. “I don’t understand…” 

 

She clicks her tongue, flicking her hand through the air like she’s trying to bat her own strange feelings away. “Neither do I.”

 

He moves like he’s going to step closer, but she halts him with a palm upturned. 

 

“I’ve never stayed in one place for so long,” Lavellan says, finally, the words grinding out of her as though by some great force. “This is…” She gestures at the house, at Cullen, at Custard. Lavellan feels lost, and she feels like she’s betrayed him for not finding happiness where he’s found it. “For you, this is steady ground. For me, it is stagnation. And the more I do, the less there is to do, but I am… without a purpose.” The clan she was always meant to lead is behind her; the Inquisition, too, is past. She has no people and no foci. Her heart is beating far too quickly. 

 

She expects to find betrayal in his expression and finds only sadness. “I didn’t… Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“How could I?” She exhales, all energy suddenly drained from her body. The unspoken words that coiled themselves so tightly around her heart finally out in the open. Without them, she doesn’t know how to keep herself upright. “You’re at home here. This is… your home.” 

 

Cullen makes a noise, something almost like laughter. It tells her more about his frayed nerves than words ever could. “Is that what you think?” 

 

“Cullen.” She does her best to keep her voice steady, despite her racing heart. “Don’t act like it’s not true.”

 

He takes a step towards her but stops himself. He looks so tired. Sadder than she has seen him in years. It breaks her heart to know that she’s the cause for it. He says her name, quietly like a sigh. “There’s no need to lie. I am happy. But this…” He rolls his hand into a fist and gently knocks on the wooden tabletop. “This isn’t the reason. This is just wood and brick and mortar. That doesn’t make a home.” 

 

“You love it.” 

 

The corner of his mouth curls upward. “I do. Just like I’d love any place I get to share with you.” She opens her mouth to protest but now he’s the one to stop her. “A house alone is not a home. You are.”

 

She runs a hand over her chest, unable to swallow. 

 

“We could leave?” she asks, and clears her throat of its hoarseness. He nods, stepping closer. It’s a small room, as small as it ever was, and one step brings him half the distance.

 

“Of course,” he murmurs. With another step, he’s in her space. She doesn’t stop him when he takes her hand, and doesn’t want to. “Whenever you like. As often as you like.”

 

She shakes her head. “You want this. The house, the dog, the family. Cullen, who am I to take them from you?”

 

His laughter is a quiet thing, but she can’t hear him hiding in it. “I’ve already got my family, haven't I?” He kisses her forehead and her crown. “Anything… more is a… discussion for another time. I don’t think Custard would let you be rid of him, either.” He takes her into his arms then, and she goes. “As for the house… I suppose I’ve always been content wherever I happen to be. For the longest time, it wasn’t entirely my choice. I’ll be just as comfortable to move on as I’ve always been.” 

 

That, she doesn’t entirely believe. This is hardly a Circle tower or a Commander’s post. He’s grown attached to the place they’ve made their own. She tells him so, her face pressed against his chest. His heartbeat is just as fast as her own.

 

“I like the house because you live here with me. Without you, it’s just a house.” He pauses to think. “It was important to me, I think, to build something. After everything that happened. Just to see if I could.”

 

“It’s not fair of me to take that from you.” 

 

“You’re not taking anything from me. I’ll gladly let it go if it means staying with you.” 

 

She knows Cullen is as honest as they come. He doesn’t lie. But there’s still that little shard of doubt stuck somewhere in the back of her mind. She doesn’t doubt his feelings for her but what if years from now, he looks back at this exact moment and resents her for what she made him give up. 

 

When she doesn’t say anything, he lets go of her and takes a step back to look at her, his hands heavy on her shoulders. “Do you trust me?”

 

She nods. After all this time, it’s an easy question to answer. 

 

“Then trust me when I say that I’m happy with this.”

 

Lavellan resigns herself to take him at his word. She leans into his chest again and he’s happy to take her, wrapping her up as tightly as he dares.

 

“Where do you want to go?” he asks. She closes her eyes.

 

And then, admits: “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know. I only need to move.”

 

“Then,” he says, breezily, “let’s go. The weather won’t permit comfortable travel for the next month or so, but -”

 

“A month is fine.” She breathes. “I can wait a month.”

 

“A month, then.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s easier now that they have plans to leave. A month is not a lot of time to prepare for that and Lavellan finds herself as busy as on the day they arrived. She’s grateful for it - busy hands to accompany her restless feet. 

 

A part of her still waits for disaster. She doesn’t mean to do it but she watches Cullen for any sign of frustration or regret. The slightest hint that he doesn’t want to leave after all. It never comes. 

 

They have few possessions when it comes down to it, just their clothes and Cullen’s books. Once they pack it all up, it’s hardly more than two people can carry. The rest belongs to the house - all the things they built with their own hands. 

 

In the end, it’s Cullen who suggests selling the house. Lavellan looks up from the letter she’s writing, trying to keep her expression blank. “We don’t have to.” 

 

Cullen shakes his head. “No, I think it’s the smartest thing to do. We built a good home here. I’d hate to see it fall back into ruin. And we could use the money to buy horses and everything else we’ll need for the road.” 

 

She watches him. With no intention of coming back, she’d prefer a clean break. But she’d just assumed that he’d like to hold on to the house, even if just for sentimental reasons. She should’ve known better. “Still a pragmatist.”

 

He smiles from across the table. “Old habits die hard.” 

 

A young couple in the village - elven, she‘s pleased to note - are eager to find a home without human landlords to contend with, and indeed have a horse of their own they’re happy to throw in with their barter. The villagers, too, are eager to offer a discount on what mounts they have to spare, and Lavellan chooses one with most the remaining gold they have from the sale of the house. 

 

The rest they tuck away with their provisions, their tools, and everything they have. 

 

In truth, Lavellan does feel melancholy the morning she mounts her new steed at Cullen’s side, looking back at the place they’ve called home for nearly a full year. She thinks perhaps she must have spent more time within these walls than all the time she resided within her fortress at the mountaintop.

 

“Are you ready?” Cullen asks and she turns her head to look at him. He’s standing next to his horse, checking the new saddle one last time. Even now, she finds no regret on his face, just the warm smile she’s always loved. 

 

Lavellan nods. The house lies still and dark, ready its new owners to make it their home. Beyond, just as familiar, looms the forest, still bare from the winter. For a moment, she thinks she can hear the hooting of an owl in the distance, but when she tries to listen more closely, there’s nothing but the wind. 

 

“Yes,” she says and grips the reins. Custard barks, running in circles around them while Cullen mounts his horse. The early spring sun is warm on their faces despite the winds from the Frostbacks and the road in front of them stretches on and on. “Yes, let’s go.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Inquire about fic requests [here!](http://wardencommando.tumblr.com/ask)  
> If you are so inclined, feel free to follow [mywordsflyup](http://damnable-rogue.tumblr.com/)'s & [Byacolate's Tumblr](http://wardencommando.tumblr.com/).


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